Mumbai: Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe has drawn a hard line in the Vimal Elaichi case. Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgn and Tiger Shroff may fill cinema halls, he said, but before the food safety law they are only advertisers—and, if the charge sticks, violators.
“According to you they may be stars, but according to me they are only advertisers in this case. So I am looking at them as violators of the law, and the law will take its own course. That’s why we have started taking action,” Mundhe told NDTV. Two of the three actors replied to August 11 show-cause notices; one did not. Adjudication and prosecution have begun against the silent party. He did not name them.
The notices target a 2024 film in which the three men endorsed Vimal Elaichi, a cardamom mouth-freshener. The FDA says the campaign is not an elaichi ad at all. It is, the nine-page notice argues, surrogate promotion of Vimal Pan Masala—a product banned in Maharashtra for a year from 13 July 2026 under Section 30(2)(a) of the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006. “Prima facie,” the notice says, the film promotes a brand “mainly associated with Pan Masala” and may mislead consumers into keeping a prohibited product in view. The actors were ordered to pull the material from their official handles and websites and explain themselves in 15 days. Sections 24 and 53 of the FSS Act—misleading food advertisements, penalty up to ₹10 lakh—were cited.
Surrogate advertising is the legal name for that tactic: selling a banned or restricted product by dressing the campaign as an ad for a lawful cousin that wears the same name, logo and colours. India has no single “Surrogate Advertising Act.” The ban is assembled from several statutes. The CCPA’s 2022 Guidelines under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 define a surrogate ad as one that promotes goods whose advertising is prohibited by posing as an ad for goods that are not. Guideline 6 forbids it if the film suggests the restricted product or borrows its brand dress—unless mere shared company name is all that is used and the ad is otherwise clean. COTPA, 2003, Section 5 bars direct and indirect tobacco advertising. Cable Television Rules, 1994, Rule 7 keep liquor and tobacco off television, reading the ASCI Code into statute. ASCI itself treats an extension as genuine only if the proxy product has real GST/FSSAI registration, meaningful sales (₹5 crore nationally after two years, or ₹1 crore in a distributing state) and ad spend in proportion to those sales. A campaign that outruns elaichi invoices fails the test.
Endorsers are not spectators. The 2022 Guidelines and FSSAI’s 2018 Advertising and Claims Regulations put the same duty of truth on the face in the film as on the company that paid for it. CCPA can fine up to ₹10 lakh (₹50 lakh on repeat) and bar an endorser for one to three years. That is the doctrine Mundhe is applying: celebrity is not a defence; due diligence is.
On 14 September the Delhi High Court dismissed PB Agro LLP’s petition to quash the notices, holding Maharashtra the proper forum and saying nothing on merits. The elaichi may be real. The question Mundhe has put to three of Hindi cinema’s biggest names is whether the brand on the pack is still pan masala by another name—and whether the law will treat the messenger the same as the manufacturer.